eAction

Really Simple Syndication, known as RSS, is all the NEW Internet thing that is
making waves and ripples everywhere. It’s going to be as big as email has
become, and perhaps even bigger. It skirts around that s-p-amm-y plague filling
our Inboxes.

But, there are several aspects to it. Because of the way the term RSS is
bandied about, it is easy to get confused as to what they mean.

You know that local and regional newspapers have syndicated certain comic
strips, or humour columns, or even Ann Landers, or her twin, Dear Abby’s advice
columns for years. They provide their material to a central distribution point,
which sees that each item gets to the local papers that sign up for them.
That’s syndication; not just showing up in one paper, but in hundreds.

RSS is a system that makes that possible on the internet. The technology - once
you catch on to it, isn’t that hard. Your jaw drops and you say, “Huh! Who’da’
thunk it?”

There are four main aspects;

The RSS Reader - so you can read teasers of syndications you want to watch.

Putting syndicated columns on your site- a guest column spot for others.

Syndicating your site’s pages/writing for other sites to pick up and display.

Most blogs are automated for easy syndication - good start for techno-phobes!

I figured them out after studying the pages on this site;
http://rss.sitesell.com/provision.html and trying out the steps. However, there
Ken focuses on how to publish your own feeds. I think it makes more sense if
you get an RSS Feed reader set up on your computer and go visit a bunch of
other sites with it first.

You can, of course, if you have money to toss around, purchase a deluxe
(cusinart multipart) software package to read RSS feeds. Why you’d want to
though, when there are so many free one around, I can’t tell.

In fact, if you have a fairly up-to-date email program, and you poke around,
you may find that it already HAS an RSS feed reader! You just have to fill it
with bookmarks to the feeds you want to keep tabs on.

If you use Firefox as your internet browser, you can do as I’ve done (several
times now with all my re-installs of operating systems). That is to go to the
mozilla site, search for Sage, which is a plug in. The software will install
itself. All you do is close Firefox and open it again, and click on the Tools
tab at the top, and practically your first item there is Sage.

Whenever you click on that, you open a side bar to your browser window.
At the top of that side bar, on the right, just under the close the bar button,
is one called Options. When you click on that a menu drops down. Go to Manage
Feed List. This brings up your bookmark window. (Any other feedreader will have
similar steps).

Now, when you come to a site that has a red RSS button you click it, and a new
window will pop up with .xml text. You don’t need to read that. Just copy the
URL of that page, into your bookmark window of your feed reader. Or if someone
gives you one like mine, http://ruthes-secretroses.com/RoseBouquet.xml you can
paste it in without having to visit it.

Now you can click that title, RoseBouquet in your side bar, and presto, there
are teasers for three of my articles in my blog — (Oops, of last week. I guess
I didn’t get to updating that page yesterday).

The idea is; that much like you skim over the subjects of your emails when you
first download them, you can skim over the titles and teaser excerpts from the
sites you want to watch. When you see there is a new article that you’d like to
read, you click on the title, and whoosh! There you are.

Soon you will have that feed reader full of links, and can learn to get quite
fast at deciding which links you want to go check out further and which ones
are not of interest to you.

You could visit all your old favourite sites, and see if they have such an RSS
button. That indicates that they’ll try to keep you posted on that page
whenever they have NEW material there. Instead of visiting and browsing all the
pages you’ve already read, and spending far more time than you can spare, now
you only need to go when there is a NEW page announced, and only if it really
interests you.

Hmm. I thought this was going to a short piece today!:) But I’ll try to get
another feature done next week on one of the other aspects of RSS.